1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the disclosure relate in general to the field of computers and similar technologies, and in particular to software utilized in this field. Still more particularly, it relates to selectively sending electronic mail (email) attachments to email message recipients.
2. Description of the Related Art
For many users, email overload is common and is often exacerbated by the receipt of duplicate or unneeded email attachments. In some cases, the recipient may have already received the attachment. In others, the recipient may have been the creator and original sender of the attachment, only to receive it as a result of a reply to an email or the forwarding of an email thread. Sometimes, the recipient does not need the attachment itself, only the knowledge of who has received the attachment and who has not. Receiving unnecessary email attachments consumes time, bandwidth and storage, which may be limited. In contrast, by not sending unnecessary attachments, storage space is conserved in email systems, their speed is increased by reducing bandwidth requirements, recipient's email message download times are shorter, and the amount of clutter in their mail clients are reduced.
With existing email systems, sending an email with an attachment to a group of recipients results in all recipients listed in the TO:, CC:, and BCC: fields of the message header receiving the attachment. Current approaches to this issue are limited and include sending two copies of the email. One copy of the email with the attachment is sent to a subset of the recipient list, and another copy without the attachment is sent to the remainder of the recipients.
However, recipients responding to an email thread including one or more attachments may intentionally or unintentionally include the original attachments in their response. For example, the recipient may intentionally include the attachments if they want newly-added recipients to the email thread to receive the attachments. It is also possible for a recipient unintentionally add the attachments to their response to an email. As a result, all recipients of the response receive the attachment. Similarly, if the responder receives new attachments and adds new recipients to the email thread, then everyone copied on the thread receives the attachments, new and old. Accordingly, it would be advantageous to selectively send attachments to recipients that have not previously received them, and not send the attachments to recipients that have.